Category: Albums

Gridfailure and Interstitia, Sunyata Ontology (Pax Aeternum Records)

Imaginative collaborative album from North Carolina-based Interstitia (the noise-rock nym adopted by Graham Scala) and New York-based Gridfailure (a solo project from David Brenner, also of Diminishing). This is underground aggro ambient, if I’m going to try to put a finger on it; the aim is to evoke visions of “a disparate not-too-distant dystopian America, with military/espionage tactics, civil unrest, off-the-grid cults and militant factions, covert government police, the takeover of artificial intelligence, and the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe more realistic than ever.” As always, some of that isn’t reflected in the offerings here, but it does deliver a lot of grimy, spooky noise. Opener “Call Of The Black Hand” sounds like an electric shaver fitted with phase-shifter effects, which is in the ballpark; “Omega Agency” is more along the lines of Rhys Fulber’s Noise Unit project, meaning it’ll appeal to goths and people like that. Worth your while if you like apocalyptic underground-DJ tuneage. A-

Esther Rose, Safe To Run (New West records)

I can hardly believe the hype that’s washing over the landscape with regard to the fourth rather pedestrian country-indie album from this New Orleans-based chanteuse; pound for pound, all the praise from Pitchfork Media and whatnot has reached the same level of ridiculousness — OK, in an indie sense — that Katy Perry’s first record rode in on. I mean it’s all fine and everything, a little bit ’90s-moonbat pop, a Natalie Merchant aftertaste and whatnot, wrapped in four-chord Joni Mitchell-ness and such. This isn’t to say it’s bad or anything — I wouldn’t dare at this point — but it’s not everything you may have heard it is. Lyrically it’s about running and staying in a literal-but-really-not sense, and in order to enhance that vibe she brings in Alynda Segarra (from Hurray for the Riff Raff) for a tune, in a move that the pressed-for-way-too-many-descriptors Pitchfork wonk saw as genius, being that both ladies make albums that “juggle the personal and the public so well.” Wheel reinvented? Um, no. But it’s nice, and all that stuff. B+

Playlist

• May 19 is a magical day, not just because it’s a Friday but also because many new rock ’n’ roll albums will be “unleashed” upon the unsuspecting masses, who will buy them in bulk just so the “artists” who made those albums won’t yell at them or whatever! Since it’s getting near barbecue season, when everyone needs good wholesome, dishwasher-safe, almost-sort-of-rockin’ tunes to listen to while the kids run around with Super Soakers until the dads flip out and yell, we should probably first talk about the new album from Dave Matthews Band, Walk Around The Moon! I’m sure the title track will be a terrific example of modern AOR radio rock, so let’s go listen, ah, here we are, it’s a live version! Well I’ll be horn-swaggled, it’s more like Blue Oyster Cult than the “serious version of Barenaked Ladies” twaddle he usually puts out. His voice is trashed, so maybe the vocal line is OK, but I can’t guarantee it

• Good lord, I’d almost forgotten the fact that quirk-folk superstar Sufjan Stevens even existed! Note to self, I really must either begin to care more about quirk-indie-electronica-folkies or stop pretending that I do! Whatever, as always, the fascinating thing about his new album (Reflections, which will be released in a few hours) is trying to guess which weird outfit Stevens will wear during his concerts. Will he be “owl boy,” “Good & Plenty-striped licorice boy,” or will he suit up in some sort of variation on the stupidness 1980s-era Elton John used to wear when he really wanted people to stay away from him? I don’t care, but maybe a quick distracted listen to the new single, “Ekstasis” will do the trick! Well, that’s interesting, the tune is a neoclassical piano piece with a few edgy, dissonant moves and whatnot, so if neoclassical piano music played by someone who dresses up like an owl is your jam, it’s your lucky day!

• Endlessly annoying 1960s songwriter Paul Simon is a million years old, and he was once the singing partner of Art Garfunkel before trying to become Jimmy Buffett or whatever that whole deal was. He was married to Carrie Fisher for a year, right after she played Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi, and once she calmed down from that whole experience, she realized that she’d married Paul Simon and pleaded insanity or whatever she did to get out of it. Simon’s new full-length is titled Seven Psalms, not to be confused with the Nick Cave album, which literally came out last year and hence Simon should have known to name his album something else, and he has not released a single as of this writing, just an album trailer on YouTube, obviously just to irritate me, and yes, it worked. Yes, there he is, hanging in the studio, singing some stuff. Yuck, whatever this teaser song is, it’s all serious and maudlin, with some lyrics about getting someone to forgive him. There is a string section and a choir and it pretty much sucks, let’s finish off this column before I lose my marbles.

• And finally, ack, some people have literally no shame, because here we go, folks, look, David Crosby from Crosby Stills Nash & Young just recently died, but without missing a beat, here comes Graham Nash, the most useless one out of the bunch, with a new album, called Now! If you still drive a 1962 Dodge Dart with peace signs on it, you know that Nash is the skinny English dude who wrote like only one song that the other guys could tolerate playing at Woodstock and whatever else, the ground-breaking ceremony for the Great Pyramid of Giza or whatever other hippie festivals those guys played during the Swingin’ Sixties. The single, “A Better Life,” is flower-power ukulele-folk, and I swear I’ve heard it before, but all the weakest songs on CSNY’s 4 Way Street were written by this guy, so it’s all a wash, whatevs.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Julian Loida, “Giverny” (Gratitude Sound)

Preview title track from the album of the same name, which will be out in a couple of weeks. Art wonks will recognize Giverny as the small town outside of Paris where Claude Monet lived and worked, a place and feel that jazz/ambient percussionist/composer Loida tries to conjure through talkative piano lines, some well-placed string breaks, vocal chanting and a generally peaceful feel. Loida’s one of the good ones, his work spanning genres; he collaborates with dancers to compose scores for their performances and has partnered with visual artists and musicians from all walks. His eclectic geniality has extended into the area of community service as well: For more than two years Loida ran the Children’s Program for Shelter Music Boston, “bringing music and trauma-informed educational programming to children and families experiencing homelessness and financial insecurity in Greater Boston.” The full-length LP will be one to look forward to for certain. A

Champlin Williams Friestedt, Carrie (Sound Pollution Records)

OK, so this is a throwback-AOR supergroup of sorts, featuring Toto singer Joseph Williams, Chicago singer (for 25 years!) Bill Champlin and Swedish guitarist-producer Peter Friestedt, who released two LA Project albums that Billboard magazine, naturally, liked. Now before you confuse the title track with the old hair-metal Europe ballad, it’s not, it’s more of a happy-ass yacht-rock joint, co-written by Grammy Award-winning songwriter Randy Goodrum and features Champlin duetting with the another guy who fronted Chicago, Jason Scheff. Boy, I’ll bet there was some awkward vibes in the recording studio when they tried to fit those two egos into the booth, but it’s a very nice song, if 30 years past its sell-by date (I expected to hear Jack Paar’s “Man In Motion” song from St. Elmo’s Fire in followup just to complete the mummified feel). “The Last Unbroken Heart” pickpockets the ding-donging electric piano sound from ’80s Whitney Houston for the LP’s worst, most mawkish moments, and so it goes throughout, music to eat lobster with granny and grampy by. A

Playlist

• May 12 is on the way, bringing with it albums galore, ye, albums as far as the eye can see, like the classic biographical children’s tale One Fish Two Fish, except with albums, and I’m so excited to see if there’s anything good in this big pile! Looky there, it’s Alison Goldfrapp, who used to be in a band called Goldfrapp that featured the singing of one Alison Goldfrapp, so apparently she quit her own band to start a new one with herself? I don’t know, and let’s not dive into the Wikipedia over something so dumb (OK, I did, Goldfrapp is a duo with some keyboard player dude, I hope he’s not super-mad at her for making it obvious that she thinks he’s worthless in front of the entire planet), let’s just have a look at her new album, The Love Invention, because that’s what’s on the flames for us to talk about and blah blah blah. I have one of her albums — oops, I mean just a plain Goldfrapp album, and listened to it a few times, but it never really stuck. It was easy-time techno, which I can always deal with, but it wasn’t super-sexy or all that melodic — OK, it kind of sucked, not trying to be mean or anything, but I’ll do the dutiful and pick a random song from this new album, because the whole thing is available on YouTube right now! “So Hard So Hot” uses the same dreadful kind of keyboard sound Paul McCartney used on “Wonderful Christmastime,” so that’s a big minus right off the jump. Eh, then it smooths out and turns into a decent afterparty deep-house tune. Nothing really innovative, just decent enough technopop.

• British alt-rock/darkwave trio Esben and the Witch is named after a Danish children’s book, and let’s see, what else does Wikipedia know about them — hm, nothing really, just that they got together at some point and decided to play rock ’n’ roll songs together, which is how bands form, in case you weren’t sure. Their song “Marching Song” was used on TV shows like Beavis and Butt-head and Ringer, and so on. Hold Sacred, the band’s new LP, includes songs, one of which is “The Well.” The singer kind of sounds like Siouxsie Sioux, but not as much as Florence Welch does. The song’s kind of droopy and sad, with lots of reverb, it’s OK I guess.

• BC Camplight is the stage name of New Jersey-based singer-songwriter Brian Christinzio, who lived in Philadelphia, Pa., for a while, where he lived in an abandoned church, then moved to the U.K., where he got his act together, and then the po-po in England banned him from the country for some reason. He’s been on the straight and narrow since then; maybe you heard his 2015 single “Just Because I Love You” (not to be confused with the Anita Baker song, of course), a Smoky Robinson-meets-Brian Wilson sort of bedroom-soul tune that did OK with critics but, like basically everything else he’s done, didn’t really make him much money in record sales. That brings us to the here and now and his new album, The Last Rotation Of Earth, due out Friday. The title track is sort of like what would happen if Jr Jr could write good songs, or at least ones that would have a snowball’s chance of getting on commercial radio without annoying people. It has an enthusiastic piano line, over which Christinzo lays some subdued Beck-like college-rock vocals to decent effect.

• We’ll call it a column with Wilderness Within You, the new album from Parker Millsap, who is actually not related to Ronnie Milsap, so just stop that right now. The title track features Gillian Welch (who probably only showed up because she thought this guy’s related to Ronnie Milsap). The tune is really nice, steeped in unplugged bluegrass finder-picking, you might like it.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Bobcat Goldthwait, Soldier for Christ (PGF Records)

So, an album featuring ’80s/’90s/whatever comedian Bobcat Goldthwait performing a standup set recorded last year at Lincoln Lodge in Chicago. Like Gallagher with his watermelon-smashing Sledge-O-Matic (which has been outdone by approximately 367,000 YouTube prank videos last time I looked), Goldthwait has had a shtick going back decades, mildly funny jokes delivered in a hiccupping, “what kind of drugs is he on” voice. Reading this record’s informational one-sheet, I saw that Goldthwait has put away the cocaine and has a kid now, which gave me horrible flashbacks of Chris Rock’s most recent comedy special. Yet, I persisted. Jokes include making fun of a guy in a wheelchair for dissing Biden; the intrinsic sadness of Mylar Spongebob balloons; and trusting the government for the first time ever, upon hearing last year’s announcement that UFOs are real. It’s OK for what it is, this LP; there wasn’t much that tickled me any harder than those Jimmy JJ Walker commercials on MeTV where he’s trying to scam old people out of their Medicare. B

Fights, Scampirock (Lie Laga Records)

OK, OK, I give up, the genre of “Scandirock” is happening, and, owing to its roots being, you know, rooted in the Hives’s approach to melodic hardcore, it’s protected from on high by the prince of melodical dumbness, in other words this is even harder to hate than Finnish folk-metal. We talked about the Oslo, Norway-based Scandirock band Dudes a couple of months ago, but this fivesome is a lot more raw, and definitely more unhinged. I mean, you have to put a listen to opening track “Good Morning Neil Armstrong” on your bucket list, as the riff is up there with the Yngwie Malmsteem hammer-on madness that shot Alcatrazz’ single “God Blessed Video” into the stratosphere in the ’80s. But wait, there’s more, the vocal is sung in a scratchy-throated math-metal style I wasn’t expecting; in fact it’s probably the coolest rock tune I’ve heard in years. Buy buy buy. A+

Playlist

• Here it comes, gang, it’s already May 5, and you know what that means! Well, nothing really, unless it’s your birthday month, because you won’t really have any reason to go to the beach until June, but we can work with what we’ve got I suppose.

Ed Sheeran, – (which will eventually become known as Subtract, but for now, let’s just all pretend that this neckbearded indie-pop fraud will be super-famous forever and currently isn’t so drunk with cred that he thinks he can get away with a dumb, unpronounceable album title every year without some permanently annoyed rock critic pointing out how dumb it is)! I’ve never been able to tell that dude from that ginger prince in Britain, whatever his name, but there is no escape this time, because if I’m ever going to get this column off to my editing queens I’m going to have to stop stalling and go listen to something from this idiotically titled album. OK! The single, “Eyes Closed,” is the sort of Weeknd/Bruno Mars-style confection you’d hear if you hung around in the electronics section of Target for too long; it uses a chicken-plucking guitar-or-whatnot in order to attract listeners who don’t really like music, and then it’s millennial whoop-ish oatmeal burnishing the slightest possible variation on the same junk you’ve been hearing on bubblegum-radio for how many years now? 70? Oh, what am I even doing, let’s move it along, I don’t know how people can listen to this stuff without going completely daft. Talk about Groundhog Day, OMG.

• Yes, yes, but hark, the really stupid album names continue this week, courtesy of the Jonas Brothers, whose new album is titled The Album, no, I’m serious. Hold it, one of those Jonases is married to a British princess if I’m not mistaken. No, Wikipedia says I got it wrong, he’s actually married to a Westeros princess, the girl who was on the HBO show about dragons where all the good guys met pointless, gratuitously disgusting comeuppances, the adult CGI cartoon that was based on those books by that dude with the really stupid bosun’s mate hat, or maybe it’s a cab driver’s hat, who knows or cares. You know, somewhere in these boxes I have a specially signed CD of the Jonases’ first album, back when their record company was trying to make sure every critic in the country was talking about them. I’ll have to remember to list it for sale on Amazon at some point as a super-collectible item or something, but anyway, let’s all just calm down and talk about this new stupidly titled album. Look how grown up those boys look, my stars, and how they look so haunted after all those years of being yelled at by record company lackeys when they just wanted to play Donkey Kong, tsk tsk. The opening song is called “Sucker” (I won’t say it) and OMG it’s like that Ed Sheeran song I just talked about except the beat is more bloopy, and whichever Jonas is singing like Bo Diddley meets Prince and it’s even more bubblegummy. Ha ha, all the YouTube comments are from bots, it’s so obvious.

• The Lemon Twigs are two singing brothers from Long Island and they have a rich mommy. Thus far they’ve sort of wavered between indie, emo and glam, which might be a good direction, depending on what the new single from their upcoming album, Everything Harmony, sounds like. Ack, gag me, it’s 1960s twee, like the Young Rascals, get this trash out of my face this instant.

• We’ll end this exercise with LA Priest, whom I’ve heard about before, but there’s no Wikipedia page for him, just one for his old band, Late of the Pier. Whatever, his new space-pop LP, Fase Luna, features the tune “It’s You,” Ack, gag me, it sounds like Beck trying to be Mungo Jerry, we’re done here.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

T3nors, Naked Soul (Frontiers Records)

Had a weird little exchange the other day, on either Facebook or Twitter, I forget, where this one guy was saying that every album put out by Frontiers Records sounds the same as all the others. I can’t say I concur with that, only because basically all indie labels tend to sign bands that fall into that same trap, like, you won’t hear a Metal Blade-released LP that has much character past Slayer, for example. This one’s somewhat unique in that it features three successful AOR-style singers, Kent Hilli of Perfect Plan along, with Robbie LaBlanc and Toby Hitchock, both of whom have been in bands that specialized in Whitesnake/Jefferson Starship rawk. Spoiler, the result is a bunch of Toto-style radio nuggets with a few Scorpions-ish moments here and there, which is code for “this band has no sense of humor at all and is completely unaware that it’s not 1985 anymore.” That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means that wiseasses like me have no patience for it. B

Dust Prophet, One Last Look Upon The Sky (self-released)

Local-to-Manchester, N.H., guy Otto Kinzel continues to prove himself to be a fiercely independent warrior in the worst industry in the world, the music business. Right on time, a new album from guitarist/singer/label-runner/floor-mopper Kinzel, bass player/keyboardist Sarah Wappler and drummer Tyler MacPherson has landed, aimed at expanding on the apocalyptic verism they tabled in a teaser single a little while back, accomplishing that by pouring on classical lit-goth imagery from John Milton, Flannery O’Connor and such. Wappler kicks things off in style with a ghostly contrapuntal piano line serving as an intro, which leads us into “When The Axe Falls,” easily the best thing I’ve ever heard from Kinzel, a doom-speed Metallica joint made more delightfully indie by some guitar rawness. Riff-wise, “Dear Mrs. Budd” evokes next-level Obsessed, featuring a waltz-time bit that’s instantly memorable. New Hampshire, you really need to help these people get to their rightful place in the underground metal hierarchy, I’m serious. A+

Playlist

• Here we go, my precious trolls, just like every Friday, April 28 will be a day on which new rock ’n’ roll albums will appear magically, in your Spotify, because that’s how things are done, in these United States! The first thing that jumped out at me in this week’s list was an album titled Signs of Life, from Neil Gaiman, the human who wrote Sandman and all those other Lovecraft-meets-X-Men books and comics or whatever his trip is, I’ve never really gotten into any of that stuff. But wait, why would an esteemed author make an album when he doesn’t have to? In this case I’ll bet it’s because he’s sick of watching his wife, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, make all the albums in the family. I would definitely do that too, like, if Petunia were an author of romance novels, I’d definitely drop the nonfiction book about social media that I’m working on right now and write a book about smooches and sexytimes just to keep her on her toes and get a nice sweet $2,000 advance from Harlequin Romance And Sexytime Book Co. and spend it on a used copy of Spider-Man No. 3 or whatever, as opposed to a signed copy of Sandman No. 1 or whatnot, you feel me? Anyway, folks, Gaiman is not a one-man band, so his music album needed actual musicians, and so he hired a group of instrument-playing slackers he knows, who call themselves the FourPlay String Quartet (see what they did there?), and those people play on this (probably completely pointless) album. I’ll now meander over to the YouTube box and listen to one of the tunes, “Bloody Sunrise,” which I selected because it looks like there’s a hot vampire girl in the video. Yup, it’s a cute vampire girl, and she’s singing a quirky comedy number about crawling out of her coffin and hanging around with bats and owls and trying to get a boyfriend, and oops, there’s the string quartet, and the vampire girl sings decently enough, like a third-place finisher on The Voice, something like that. There’s a random TV in the graveyard, and every once in a while Neil Gaiman (I think) appears on the TV and starts harmonizing with the vampire girl. This would be something for the Neil Gaiman completist on your holiday shopping list, because why wouldn’t they want to see proof that Neil Gaiman once did something incredibly dumb?

• If you’re like me at all, you’d given up on Canadian art-rock bands after the first one you ever heard, but you actually held a little hope for Braids, whose new LP, Euphoric Recall, has a very worthwhile little single, “Evolution.” Overall, it evokes an understated-electro version of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay,” something that Sia would definitely do. It’s a good one.

• Believe it or not, there are bands in Cincinnati, Ohio, friends, and one of them, The National, recorded a single that former President Barack Obama named as one of his favorite songs of 2017, namely “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” which was indeed jagged, slightly aggressive and cool overall. The band’s new album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, leads off with the song “Eucalyptus,” an art-rock thingamajig that combines the sounds of late-’80s Wire and Guster to create a slightly cowboy-ish atmosphere. It’s perfectly fine.

• Lastly it’s Canadian folk-rockers Great Lake Swimmers, with their new album, Uncertain Country! They’ve released albums on the Nettwerk Records label, which is code for “they’re consistently good.” The new single “Moonlight, Stay Above” is way too Bon Iver-y for my tastes, but other than that is shimmery and peaceful and blah blah blah.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Messa, Live At Roadburn (Svart Records)

Meanwhile, back in the doom-metal sphere, we have this new four-song LP from an Italian crew whose unlikeliest press quote came by way of Spin magazine: “If you’ve ever longed for an album that could reconcile Stevie Nicks at her witchiest with the sublime gloom of How the Gods Kill-era Danzig, this is the LP of your dreams.” Anyhow, these guys have a girl singer, which works when the (always slow) music is new-age-y or folky, but when it goes more in the direction of raw, blissed-out, Candlemass/Kyuss-tinted doom metal, it’s a bit of a reach, at least with her vocals, which, although strong overall (she sounds more like Florence Welch than Stevie Nicks, point of order), sound a little overwhelmed in the context. I’m sure she’d rather be in a Nightwish-type epic-metal band, but she’ll figure that out at some point. It’s a different kind of trip, I can assure you of that. A

Ric Wilson, Chromeo, & A-Trak, Clusterfunk (Free Disco Records)

Collaborative, highly accessible nine-song EP from a bunch of guys I remember covering (or ignoring) during my days covering velvet-rope club techno back in the mid-aughts. And that was probably to my detriment; I keep hearing about this or that going on with A-Trak and Wilson, but I don’t like Chromeo, as you may have noticed in these pages, and probably never will. Suffice to say, though, that this record is a pretty big deal, there are lots of semi-famous names on board this often catchy funk/hip-hop/spoken-word fricassee, such as King Louie (who tables some cool weirdo-rap on the ’90s-prostrating “Whisky In My Coffee”), Felicia Douglass of Dirty Projectors (in the Kool & The Gang-sounding “Everyone Moves To LA”), STIC.MAN of Dead Prez (on the record’s most fascinating dance-funk track, “Git Up Off My Neck”), Kiéla Adira and Mariame Kaba, whose spoken-word rant on the criminal justice system is pretty priceless. A

Playlist

• This Friday is April 21, which means we’re pretty much done with this stupid delayed-action winter, unless Mother Nature has plans to dump 20 feet of snow on us just to see if we’re paying attention. Ha ha, remember in January, there was no snow, and it was kind of warm, and everyone was like, “yeah, wow, talk about a lame winter” but suddenly in March (my least favorite month to begin with) good old “MoNat” (that’s the celebrity hip-hop name for Mother Nature) realized she’d lost all track of time playing Candy Crush, and she suddenly turned into Oprah Winfrey, yelling “Yikes, here you go, you get a driveway covered in a foot of frozen vanilla Slushy, and you do too” and whatnot, and all that massively heavy, dense-packed hatefulness sent 8,000 people to the hospital with chest pains and dislocated elbows? Well, folks, it’s almost over, it almost is, but first we must talk about a few albums that will be streeting this week. I’ve decided that we’ll start the week with Atum, a new album from comically overrated ’90s band The Smashing Pumpkins, because that’s what’s crackalackin’, home skillets, look at the ’90s rebirth that’s happening all around us, it’s all that and a bag of chips, I tell you! Can you even believe it, a new Pumpkins platter, and the band is still fronted by that Uncle Fester dude. I keep seeing all kinds of tweets and stuff saying, “Man, I loved the Pumpkins back in the shizniz, they were so fly, booyah,” and no one gets into an argument with them because they feel so sad for them. Anyway, I’ll bet this music will be absolutely awful if it’s anything like old Pumpkins, so I suppose I should trudge off to the YouTube box and see what the new single, “Beguiled,” is about. OK, here’s the video, and the tune is pretty much like Megadeth-metal at first, and ha ha, look at Billy Uncle Fester, all dressed up like the crazy dream-villain from that Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell, but it’s 100 times worse than ever before, like he’s really trying to channel that Cell dude. You shouldn’t let your kids watch this video. Huh, now there are ballerinas doing Swan Lake stuff, in Uncle Billy’s creepy Cell world. The song is OK if you like mid-tempo ’90s metal. Hm, now a bunch of people are doing fancy modern dances and stuff. One of the guys looks like Jim Carrey’s alter ego from The Mask. The ’90s are coming back, folks, there is no escape. Pray for us all.

• No way, a new album from The Mars Volta, with their most transgressive title yet, Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon, which translates to “May God curse you my heart.” Lol whatever, I’ve made fun of — um, I mean, reviewed some of their previous albums, like, their music has always struck me as freeze-dried low-grade prog-rock that’s missing its flavor packet, but let’s not go there, I’ll go have a listen to the title track and be normal. Wow, it sounds like Latin-radio stuff, which is a lot better than anything these guys have ever done. Maybe there’s hope, fam.

• Frenetic and spazzy flamenco guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela are releasing their new album, In Between Thoughts A New World, this week. Hopefully it won’t be a bunch of metal covers again, please oh please oh please. OK, the single, “Descending To Nowhere” is normal, but then a bunch of spiffy Spyro Gyra layers appear and it starts to sound like polite Weather Channel jazz. Kinda dumb but it’s OK.

• Lastly, it’s ’90s-radio-poppers Everything But The Girl, with their newest full-length, Fuse. The rope-in track is “Nothing Left To Lose,” a trippy, percussive, trance-pop dealie that sounds like Roxy Music reborn as afterparty patter. It’s perfectly fine.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Dan Montgomery, Cast-Iron Songs and Torch Ballads (Fantastic Yes Records)

The overall takeaway from “Start Again,” the opening tune from the New Jersey-bred singer-songwriter’s seventh full-length record, is, if you ask me, redolent of Iggy Pop singing for Bread. So it’s vintage-sounding, taxicab-radio stuff, which is apparently the way he started his career, fresh from his teenage years, which were spent, from the age of 14, playing Grand Funk and Bad Company covers in bars, followed by a stint busking at coffee houses and such. The story here is that he “came into possession of a Danelectro [vintage type of guitar], plugged it into an amp and new songs immediately came pouring out,” which is sometimes all it takes to come up with a very inspired-sounding album. To pinpoint the music a little better, it’s floating-on-a-cloud Americana-rock, with some diversions into ’80s-pop-rock (the Dire Straits-ish “In For A Penny”), cowboy-hat jam-band grooving (“Lonesome Train”), early Bad Company (“Beaumont”) and things of that nature. It’s too sturdy (and sometimes too muddy) to be labeled a fedora-rock joint, so I’m down for it for what it is. A

Various Artists, Remmah Rundown (Remmah Records)

Just when I thought I was out of the techno club scene, they drag me back in, I tell you. This compilation comes to us from Northern Irish DJ, producer and label head Hammer, a.k.a. Rory Hamilton, who wants to clue us in to the electronic music scenes in Glasgow and Ireland, or at least the parts he’s familiar with. Like with basically any decent club mix, there’s plenty here to make your chillout experience better, which brings us to the part where I try to differentiate this stuff from early Diplo and all that kind of thing. I could fib for effect and say it’s jaw-droppingly innovative, these average-tempo dance beats, but let’s not bother; I’ve heard wub-wub like Hammer’s “Sickwave” before, and Rohypnol-glitch-tech like Remmy’s “I Know,” for that matter, and so have you, but Hamilton obviously isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, just remind people it exists. Solid all around. A

Playlist

• April 14 is a Friday, which means that you will have an extra day or so before you have to send Uncle Sam the money you owe him for taxes, or at least I think that’s how it works, I mean, you do you, I don’t think the IRS really cares anyway, but let’s kick off this week right away, because there’s a lot to get to, starting with 80-year-old bikini lady Ann-Margret, who was mostly famous for hanging around in Las Vegas with none other than Elvis, as well as being lasciviously ogled by Johnny Carson every time she appeared on the Tonight show during the ’60s and ’70s. No, I’m not kidding, Ann-Margret has a new album coming out this Friday, Born To Be Wild, which may or may not be a reference to the Steppenwolf song that came out when Thomas Jefferson was president, or maybe earlier, I honestly forget. You know, I’m just checking the Metacritic.com aggregate score for all of Ann-Margret’s films, and it’s dead even at this writing. Critics thought some of her movies were really dumb, like The Villain and The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, whereas they liked some of her other movies, for instance 1975’s Tommy, which featured Jack Nicholson and Keith Moon. But I digress, which usually happens when I’m reviewing albums from 1960s pinup girls, so let’s get to the gettin’ on and have a listen to the title track, come on, don’t be shy. Ack, her backing band on this tune is the Fuzztones, and it’s not completely horrible. OK, it is, but she’s on key for a few bars, unless I’m hearing things. Other notes: The Who’s guitarist Pete Townshend can be heard on this album’s cover version of the Everly Brothers’ classic “Bye Bye Love”; other guests include Joe Perry, Steve Cropper, Rick Wakeman and Chip Z’Nuff.

• No way, bro, a new Metallica album, called 72 Seasons, I’m totally down with that! Say, has anyone ever noticed that the band’s drummer and leader, Lars Ulrich, is like the Elon Musk of heavy metal, like, remember when they did the 5.98 EP just to remind folks that they were still edgy and punk, even though they were just about to get rid of guitar solos for a few albums in order to be like Papa Roach, because people don’t want complicated music, man, they just want to be stupid, and now we have two million bands that sound exactly like Bury Your Dead? No? Well it’s all Metallica’s fault that metal sucks now, but let’s try to get past that and go listen to a new song from this Metallica album, “If Darkness Had a Son,” before the album premieres in cinemas on the 13th (no, I’m not kidding)! Hm, it’s got a cool syncopated riff, it’s not completely horrible, well, at least before the vocals come in, all dishwasher-safe. Iron Maiden fans would like this, I guess.

• Ack, just when you thought you’d never have to hear aughts-era Canadian indie-pop ever again, look, it’s Feist, with her new album, Multitudes! Lol, remember when she lent her song “1234” to that iPod Nano TV ad and said something like “Well hey man, at least it wasn’t a preconceived marketing ploy” or whatever? Classic stuff, but the new single, “Hiding Out In The Open,” finds Feist in unplugged Joni Mitchell mode. The song isn’t completely horrible, which isn’t to say it’s terribly catchy or whatnot.

• We’ll end with Fruit Bats, remember those guys from a few years ago? That’s cool, I don’t remember a thing about them other than the fact that their PR people were demanding that I write about them. Their new LP, A River Running To Your Heart, includes a song called “Rushin’ River Valley,” sort of a cross between Decemberists and Guster, it’s breezy and nice, it’s fine by me.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Poh Hock, Gallimaufry (self-released)

According to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the definition for the word “gallimaufry” is “a confused jumble or medley of things.” That tracks with respect to this EP, as Poh Hock Kee’s latest songwriting foray blends jazz, prog, classic rock, soul and disco. This one launches with a spazzy bang with “Forward,” a light-speed tune that sounds like Al di Meola invading a Tonight show band rehearsal, and that leads into something even more show-stopping, “Another One Of Those Times,” which combines straight-ahead Return To Forever-ish prog rock with a highly melodic pop vocal that would have fit fine with peak-career Janet Jackson (Debo Ray does the honors on the singing end). But wait, there’s more, “I Don’t” reads like Eddie Van Halen jamming with Talas but much bigger-sounding and more sweeping. Whatever, I have no idea where this guy’s been, but this is truly groundbreaking stuff, demonstrating a deep love for wonky experimentation without ever getting bogged down with academic tedium. If you’re a prog guitarist, get on this immediately, this guy’s a genius. A+

Glorious Bankrobbers, Back on the Road (Sound Pollution Records)

“Swedish sleaze-rock,” these guys call what they do, but first we should talk about how this band would have made a few thousand bucks, maybe enough for a second-hand 1982 Toyota Corolla or a nifty barbecue smoker-barrel, if their manager hadn’t sold all their promotional freebie records in secondhand stores for beer money, which (spoiler) resulted in this band being denied any reviews or radio airplay, and of course they broke up soon after the release. It’s awful what happens to nice, totally innocent dudes who just want to get drunk and steal girlfriends, it’s just the worst, it’s almost like no one cares about us, but anyway, the guitar sound pulled me in for a second here, and I was expecting to hear some sort of New York Dolls vibe, which always gets props in this newspaper column, you guys know the drill by now. But no, this is basically a Poison clone band, as in the singer sounds exactly like Brett Michaels, which means the overall effect isn’t all that sleazy, but I get what they mean. All righty then. B-

Playlist

• Like every Friday, a new batch of albums will appear this Friday, April 7, whether you plan to buy them or not. This is a devilish plot that hatches every week because the record companies know that you’re going to have to spend all your money someplace on Fridays, so they figure that if you happen by chance to see new albums, you’ll buy them, even if they’re from Van Morrison or someone who used to be in the Smiths, because you can’t control yourself. But enough of that sort of talk, let’s dig in to this week’s foul-smelling pile and see what we — ah, look, it’s an album from Thomas Bangalter, who is one half of the former French house music duo Daft Punk, whom you know as weird techno nerds in motorcycle helmets. I was honestly never big into Daft Punk, preferring instead to listen to more traditional deep house stuff as well as being a bit allergic to Auto-Tuned singing in general and bands hiding their faces for no reason whatsoever in particular, not to mention the fact that if there’s any band I can’t stand, it’s Phoenix, but anyway, you get the picture. Bangalter’s debut solo album, Mythologies, comprises the score of a 90-minute ballet of the same name, which premiered in July 2022, featuring direction and choreography by Angelin Preljocaj. All I’ve heard so far from this record is “L’Accouchement,” which isn’t in waltz time so I doubt there’s much dancing, it’s just really melancholy sad-face sturm und drang. Hard pass from this critic.

• Heather Woods Broderick is a singer-guitarist who’s originally from Maine, which is near New Hampshire; otherwise I probably wouldn’t be giving her any free publicity in this column. She has released solo material under her own name, as well as having been a member of Efterklang, Horse Feathers and Loch Lomond. She has a new album coming out this Friday title Labyrinth, which includes the push-single “Crashing Against The Sun,” a very nice, lush slow-burner that has a shoegaze tint to it while rooted in something along the lines of Lana Del Rey as far as woozy, halcyon vibe. It’s decent, even if the keyboards sound like they came from 1993.

• If you’re a GenXer who hates to feel old, don’t read the rest of this sentence, because it will tell you that the very first Mudhoney album came out 34 years ago. That band is sort if the Ed McMahon of ’80s/’90s grunge, like, basically they were awful, but because they were from Seattle, like Nirvana and Soundgarden and all those guys, they were given recording contracts and studio time and groupies, just as long as they didn’t blow up really really bigly, not that there was ever any danger of that actually happening. So, right, the band’s new LP, Plastic Eternity, is led off by the single “Almost Everything,” which is decent insofar as having a no-wave/noise-rock feel to it, like it sounds like Michael Stipe doofing around with a garage band that has a deep love for neo-psychedelica a la Brian Jonestown Massacre. That genre’s been done to death, sure, but this is a pretty good attempt.

• For my last trick, look, it’s Billie Marten, a British singer-songwriter and musician from Ripon in North Yorkshire, whatever that’s supposed to designate in the British language. She first appeared on the acoustic folk scene at the age of 12, when a YouTube of her singing attracted thousands of views, or so it’s claimed (seriously, go look, Wikipedia doesn’t quite believe it but it’s still in her Wiki page). Drop Cherries, her new album, includes a tune called “This Is How We Move,” an unplugged bit powered by guitar and a string section. It’s kind of Joni Mitchell-ish, if that’s your jam; it didn’t immediately grab me but it’s OK.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Glitter Wizard, Kiss The Boot (Kitten Robot Records)

Sure, these guys are good for what they do, which, for over a decade, has been sort of a cross between T-Rex and the first two Kiss albums (stop cringing). This is a crew of five dudes from San Francisco who are into combining psychedelica, old glam rock, punk, and (sort of) prog in order to table a That 70s Show party vibe. The lead guitarist is decent, reaching for the acid-rock stratosphere with squealy, pinched notes around every corner, but what I actually like best is that the backing vocals are a complete mess, probably having been recorded on the cheap with the remaining 20 minutes of recording studio time. I’d venture to say that fans of Black Lips would be jiggy with this, but in the end, if this bunch sticks with this off-the-rack lo-fi engineering, they could probably end up putting out a single that ends up replacing Gary Glitter’s “Rock ’n’ Roll” at football games. Do I expect that to happen? Well, no, but who knows. A

The Church, The Hypnogogue (Communicating Vessels Records)

I’d say everyone who was club-hopping in the ’80s has heard of this Australian New Wave quintet, but being able to name one of their songs is a whole ’nother trick. If you rack your brain hard enough you might come up with the title of the one song that charted in the U.S., “Under The Milky Way,” which was sort of like what it might have sounded like if Lou Reed had stolen “Eleanor Rigby.” Anyway, they’re back, still led by bass player and singer Steve Kilbey, and they do seem to have evolved a little. They’re still purveyors of a lay-back-and-drink vibe; for instance, “No Other You” has the same sort of laid-back rawk energy as Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” but with a more, you know, throwback New Wave sound. The title track tables the same sort of sleepiness but takes something of a Savage Republic approach. Not sure why I’d ever listen to this record again, but you do you. A

Playlist

• A lot has come in lately, so let’s play a little catch-up with some releases from earlier this month, that’d be great. May as well start with So Much (For) Stardust, the new album from emo-rock heroes Fall Out Boy. I saw those dudes open up for someone years ago, I think it was Motley Crue, and they were only provided around a quarter of the stage on which to move around and sing their little emo songs. You’ve heard them before for sure, probably at a Chuck E Cheese or someplace else that has a lot of little kids running around and spazzing to barely punk-ish music that’s sort of like the Velveeta cheese version of Iron Maiden, i.e. the prototype for Imagine Dragons, like that one song of theirs that always plays over loudspeakers when you least expect it, “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark,” with its spazzy millennial-whoop “oh-oh-oh” verse and matching chorus; it’s actually OK now that it’s too old for anyone to really care about anymore, like if you told a 9-year-old it was heavy metal they’d have no choice but to believe you. So this Illinois-based band, which originally tried to be taken seriously in the Chicago punk scene before choosing to rip off Taking Back Sunday and all those guys, wants you to know about this new album and its single, “Heartbreak Feels So Good,” a totally worthless, biodegradably recyclable hunk of music-trash that sounds like Dashboard Confessional trying to rewrite the main theme to Footloose, but first, at the top of the tune’s video, they insist that you watch them “pull a prank” by pretending to kidnap Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo from in front of an ice cream stand or something, but it all hilariously backfires and a bunch of girls start chasing them around like they’re The Monkees, and the total effect is like watching early MTV, when the world got its first insights into how rock stars shouldn’t try to make comedy videos. Talk about awful stuff, let’s move on.

• Borderline-goth-pop pioneers and closet Ultravox wannabes Depeche Mode are back, with their 15th album, Memento Mori. There are approximately 3,291 goth bands I like more than Depeche Mode, but owing to their rabid fan base, I think I can feign interest in them for a short little writeup here, so let’s go. David Gahan and Martin Gore are still in the band, but that’s about it, not that the fact that the band is barely Depeche Mode anymore could possibly detract from their sound, and remember, I don’t care in the first place, but never fear, people who love this band, literally nothing has changed: The single, “Ghosts Again,” may as well have come out in 1987, yes, it’s that dated. You know, Pet Shop Boys are literally a hundred times more listenable than this stuff, even though they’re also really old people, but if you insist, go ahead and pretend it’s relevant, I cannot prevent it.

• You’d probably have heard of British synthpop lady Ellie Goulding, but for the most part she’s really only popular in other countries. This is typical, of course, because the only singers Americans care about are Taylor Swift and Willie Nelson. Her new album, Higher Than Heaven, is coming out this Friday and it includes “Let It Die,” a Michael Jackson-ish tune that showcases her Dolly Parton-esque soprano. It’s OK.

• Lastly, look, it’s those three little Japanese teenage girls, Babymetal, with another album, The Other One! Did you even know they existed? I didn’t, but now I know that there is a band that combines Slayer with happy, super-high-pitched singing that would be more at home on a joke album. These little rascals have played shows in which Rob Halford from Judas Priest got up and sang with them. I give up.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Personal Blend, Inhale and Release (self-released)

Rochester, N.Y.-based seven-piece reggae-rock band for parties, bar mitzvahs and rock clubs, if those things even still exist. Surf, reggae, rock, dub and Rasta are the game that’s afoot here; I’d agree with the press blurb that pronounces these songs “complex arrangements” featuring digital drum rhythms, punchy horn lines and ambient vocal melodies, but really, how complex would you want your drinking music to be? OK, maybe something along the lines of Disco Biscuits, Minus The Bear or geez, I dunno, there are times when these guys go off on a prog tangent (“Skin Deep” is quite priceless). It’s pretty tight for sure, probably owing to the machine-made drums. Overall there’s a psychedelic vibe to this stuff, I suppose, but this band is dedicated to standard-issue riddims even when they throw in arena-rock curveballs like spaghetti Western guitars for mariachi-esque effect (“Watch Your Step”). Nothing wrong here. A

Walking Bombs, Spiritual Dreams Above Empty Promises (self-released)

I’m told that DIY punk dude Morgan Y. Evans — not to be confused with country music’s Morgan Evans, who recently went through a painful divorce — will be releasing several albums this year, including this one, a set of lo-fi creepy tunes “about trying not to lose hope and to remain centered despite the world’s sorrows and perils.” Written just after the death of Evans’ mother, it deals with topics like mortality, spirituality, individuality, gun violence, love and being startled awake by technology. It definitely has an early Nick Cave-in-gloom-mode feel as it labels out sentiments intended to fix someone (probably the artist himself, it would seem), for instance how we need to remember that cynicism is not as powerful as our deeper hopes, dreams and empathy. If you have any love for the Throbbing Lobster era, there’s a lot here to like; I’d offer Swans as a comparison but it’s a little too speedy (as in midtempo) for that. Same ballpark, though. A

Playlist

• New albums will magically appear this Friday, March 31, so that you can buy them, like a good doobie, for your music collection! Let’s see here, we’ve got Packs, an Ottawa, Canada-based indie quartet that’s fronted by some art school slacker named Madeline Link, who decided that her chosen career of making papier mache animals or whatever she makes out of papier mache wasn’t as spiritually fulfilling (i.e. profitable) as making awful music to go with it. Anyway, Packs’ new album, Crispy Crunchy Nothing, is just about here, and man, the new single is so awful I can’t even comprehend it, like, if they’d at least add a weird Clinic-style organ player it’d be less bad than Broadcast, but no, they’re truly out to annoy me as much as they can. It’s like Pavement, but even more Pavement-y than the average human constitution is built to withstand. My, what wonderfully off-key guitars you have, Packs! Did they hold open auditions for the very worst musicians in Canada, or — you know, I mean, how could a band even be this bad? This junk is out of style anyway, if you ask me, like I really doubt Generation Z wants nothing more out of the party lives than listening to junk that sounds like it was rejected from the Juno soundtrack, you know? I was watching some “Why New Music Sucks” influencer video where some millennial girl was trying to explain that “sorry, older people, tastes change” (Really?! Someone call the New York Times!), and that now, in her wizened wisdom, she’s figured out that Zoomers want a mixture of styles, can you imagine such a thing? This means that when Zeppelin mixed early 1900s-era American folk with heavy metal, that didn’t count as a “mixture of styles,” nor did it count when her own generation (when it wasn’t listening to truly horrible bands like Slint and Franz Ferdinand) was guzzling purple drank and watching YouTubes of Megadeth vs. Pointer Sisters mashups. I mean, I’m confused, guys. I’m confused about a lot of things, actually, but I’m not confused about how awful Pavement was, nor am I convinced that garbagey trash like this Packs album has any redeeming musical qualities at all. But really, bon appetit if listenability doesn’t matter when you’re compiling your daily Soundcloud. (Note to self: How did this ever happen?)

• Great, time once again to try to remember the difference between Deerhoof, Deer Tick and Deerhunter, oh that’s right, I don’t care. No, I’m kidding, Deerhoof is the indie band who did — let’s see, blah blah blah — never mind, no one reading this has ever heard any of their songs, unless they were at a frat party in 2005 maybe? So anyway, their fast-approaching new disk, titled Miracle-Level, features the single “Sit Down, Let Me Tell You a Story,” and boy is it awful. Absolutely terrible.

• Right, right, so James Holden is a British weird-beard electro DJ, and his new LP, This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities, has a new single making the rounds, called “Common Land,” which is pretty cool, some bizarre but accessible noise loops and a neat breakbeat. I have heard much worse songs before in my life.

• Lastly, let’s get the new Hold Steady album, The Price of Progress, out of the way so I don’t have to think about oi-rock again this week. Hm, wait, this new single, “Sideways Skull” is OK if you like noise-rock. It’s like Frank Black playing for early Big Black, a comparison you’d appreciate if you had any shred of hope that rock ’n’ roll might rise again (it won’t, but that hasn’t stopped it from trying once in a while).

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Creye, III: Weightless (Frontiers Music)

Some epic melodic metal from Sweden here, in the vein of bands like Heat and whatnot. Their sound is even cleaner than Trans Siberian Orchestra, if you can even conceive of such a thing, and that makes this stuff come off as a bit one-dimensional, but not, I assure you, in the area of wonky musicianship, which is what should really matter, and I’m well aware of that. But still, in between all the (very complicated and clever) riffing and all that, I was really hoping to hear some bad-assery, something messy or slightly dangerous, but it didn’t really happen for me. Now, all that means is that I wouldn’t play this in the car, but I can still heartily recommend it if you ever wanted to hear a smarter, more prog-rock version of Iron Maiden, or at least an Iron Maiden that sounds freshly scrubbed for dinner, like White Lion or some such hair-metal thingie. But again, the selling point is that these guys can really play. A

Public Serpents, The Bully Puppet (SBAM Records)

And here we have a ska-punk band from New Jersey. I didn’t even know that was still a thing, you know? What’s that? No, I was referring to New Jersey, not ska-punk. But anyway, folks, all seriousness aside, this band’s leader, who goes by the name of Skwert, has had a rough time of it over the last few years, enduring incarceration, homelessness and the end of his marriage, so if you like ska-punk, and who actually does, this would be a wise investment, as maybe Skwert could take some time off to rest his voice, because right now these tunes sound like a really drunk Ozzy Osbourne singing for the Suicide Machines except the horn section is better. There’s really nothing stunningly innovative here, not that you’d want innovative music if the only reason you’d ever even sit through a ska band would be to get to the three 19-year-olds playing hamster-wheel straight-edge stuff after them. Side question: Do people still listen to Sublime anymore, or was that just a giant troll? A

Playlist

• March 17 is a Friday, which means a day of new CD releases, because that’s just how it works, folks. It used to be Tuesdays when all the albums would be released, if I recall correctly, but the record industry changed the traditional release weekday to Friday in their infinite wisdom, after figuring out that Fridays are a lot better, because that’s the day rock ’n’ roll fans figure is the most safe for partaking in day-drinking and puffing wacky tobaccy during work hours, and when quittin’ time comes around they leave work completely shnockered, burn rubber out of the parking lot and just randomly go buy albums at Strawberries and Bradlees and Woolworths. OK maybe not anymore, which only brings up the question, “Is music still cool if all you have to do to obtain it is download it from a pirate site or whatnot?” I don’t think so, but little shining points of light pop out of nowhere now and then, for instance this week’s spotlight new LP, Fantasy, from excellent French weird-beard soundsystem M83, whom you may know if you’re either young or were a fan of the Ovation network’s TV show Versailles (M83 did the impossibly epic theme song) until its untimely demise in 2018. I’m sure this’ll mark a high point for these guys, unless they’ve run out of ideas like everybody else, and toward answering that pressing question I’ll venture into the YouTube, to see what I can hear. I’ll bet you anything that by now they’re ready to make some real money out of their success, so there’s some edgy diva like Zola Jesus guesting on a single that you’ll hear playing at — well, I don’t know, where do people even hear music being played nowadays? Roller skating rinks? Red Lobster? Seriously, now that rock is completely dead, and there’s nothing left of the club scene except for bored-looking (and honestly bored) 20-somethings standing around listening to chopped-and-screwed versions of “My Humps” or whatever, who’s going to buy this awesome new M83 album? I’ll leave that here, with a scratching-my-head emoji added as emphasis, for you to puzzle over, but meanwhile, the group’s new single, “Oceans Niagara” is completely epic and cool, a really buzzy electro dance-beat infused with an urgent, energetic, loud-ass multi-voiced chorus. M83 are still the best, don’t even argue with me.

• Unknown Mortal Orchestra, a band from Auckland, New Zealand, is all about the psychedelic rock ’n’ roll, just like our good buddies, whose name takes up nearly a full line of column space, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard. There’s something fishy about all the awesome stoner-rock coming from “Down Under,” like this new album from UMO, titled V, but either way, these fellas are based in Portland, Oregon, now, so we’ll see if being far away from King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard had any negative effect on these new songs. I’m test-driving the new single, “Hunnybee,” and it’s not stoner-rock at all, it’s chill soul-pop, like Bon Iver trying to be Jamie Lidell. It’s OK I guess.

• Speaking of weird people with Warp record contracts, it’s Yves Tumor, with his new one, Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume. The rollout track, “God Is a Circle,” is driven by loud, muddy bass, mumbled vocals and industrial samples, I like it just fine really.

• Lastly, it’s Black Honey, a U.K. indie band that’s gone through a few name changes, so no, I already don’t take them seriously at all. A Fistful Of Peaches is their new album, and the video for the song “OK” has a seizure warning (I’m not taking that seriously either). The tune is like Foo Fighters but with a vampy girl singer. It’s cool overall.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).